"When Paul noticed that some were Sadducees and others were Pharisees..." (Acts 23:6)
One of my favorite comedic lines is "see what I did there?" It is usually uttered after some terrible pun (fathers - with your terrible "dad jokes" - take note here!) or other verbal acrobatics that the speaker just doesn't want the listener to miss. Paul, after Acts 23:6, probably would've leaned over to a friend and said, "see what I did there?"
Paul is on trial in this scene. Is he on trial for a good reason? No. Does he know that the whole thing is just judicial theatrics? Yes. If he refuses to play along, they'll just beat/imprison/kill him. But if he plays along - as he supposed to - then he's only feeding the injustice. This is a lose-lose situation. To the original audience reading this account - especially this late into the book of Luke-Acts - there would have been a creeping dread that Paul, our hero for the past 13 or so chapters, is about to die. We may miss this tension because we aren't the original audience, but it is there.
Furthermore, the original audience, which was a church under persecution, may very well have internalized this scenario. Certainly they were all aware that following Jesus Christ meant that they could very easily find themselves in their own lose-lose situation. So they're watching Paul with dread over the worst case scenario and wonderment and intrigue to see if hope can spring forth yet again. And hope does, but maybe not in the way we tend to think about hope. We tend to think about hope in rather romantic terms. It is an internal swelling of emotion that causes us to hold our heads high while others mock us. Or it is a deep strength that comes at the precise moment when incredible action is needed. Lots of movies - especially of the natural disaster and sports genres - play up this vision of hope. But this isn't the way hope breaks into Paul's story.
In Paul's story, he realizes that some of those who are seeking to destroy him aren't, actually, all that friendly with one another. Pharisees and Sadducees had plenty to disagree about, especially about (as verse 8 makes clear) resurrection, angels, and spirits. So Paul, the current target of all their anger and angst, just redirects the conversation away from himself. He does a little bit of verbal jujitsu. He uses their energy against them and - in a way - manufactures his own hope. They start fighting with each other and he is whisked away to live another day.
This leaves us with only one burning question: Is hope that is manufactured real hope? From the cinematic, romantic point of view - No. But from the persecuted and prosecuted point of view - Absolutely! Paul shows us how - in a violent world - to use the energy from that violence for good. He, himself, is not violent. He uses - as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would many years later - Nonviolent Direct Action. And learning to see the spaces that God provides for manufacturing hope in hopeless circumstances is as much a spiritual discipline as praying, worshipping, and even what you're doing now: doing devotions.
That the church has lost this spiritual discipline is a reflection of two realities, one good and one bad. The first reality is that we are no longer persecuted as the early church was. This is good. The second reality is that we don't put ourselves - in our attempts to witness to the world - in the position to stand for and defend the persecuted. This is bad. Those who are persecuted and oppressed need us for two reasons: First, we can stand with them and be an advocate just as the Holy Spirit stands with us as our Advocate; this is holy work. Second, we can teach the persecuted how to do our spiritual jujitsu so that they are less inclined toward violence, which keeps everyone safer. And this is holy work too. Amen.